Video is an effective way to capture a scene or an unfolding event. People often capture video sequences for birthday parties, weddings, travel events and sports events. Unlike still images, video sequences have the advantage of capturing evolving, unstructured events, such as particular natural facial expressions and human interactions (e.g. talking, mutual smiling, kissing, hugging, handshakes). It is often desirable to select segments of a video sequence to generate a shorter version of the video sequence which contains the highlight sections. It is also desirable to remove dull, repetitive or poor quality sections of the video sequence. It is also desirable to select video highlights automatically.
One method of automatically selecting video highlights is to post-process a video sequence on a personal computer. This has the advantage that considerable processing power is available, so that techniques which use image analysis of the individual frames of the video sequence are possible. It is also possible to use additional video metadata that a camera may capture and record along with the video (such as data from gyro sensors, face detection hardware and exposure sensors). However, standard video formats do not include such additional video metadata, so proprietary video formats may be required to exchange data between the camera and a PC.